I particularly liked the bit about Butler Lampson being the first to understand Paxos, mostly because I'm current in his distributed and concurrent systems class. It turns out that when Lamport wrote the paper The Part-Time Parliament, Lampson told him that nobody actually understood it. To prove him wrong, Lamport called a few colleagues and asked them a few elementary questions about the algorithm. They all got it wrong. That prompted him to write Paxos Made Simple.
It's good to know that it's not always my fault when academic papers are entirely inscrutable.
Well, out of fairness, The Part-Time Parliament is a story about a fake Greek society, replete with "Greek"-style reinterpreted names for researchers Lamport wanted to name check. Extended metaphor is not the standard academic approach. Not to mention, the math behind the paper is kind of beyond the grasp of most on the first few readings.
I particularly liked the bit about Butler Lampson being the first to understand Paxos, mostly because I'm current in his distributed and concurrent systems class. It turns out that when Lamport wrote the paper The Part-Time Parliament, Lampson told him that nobody actually understood it. To prove him wrong, Lamport called a few colleagues and asked them a few elementary questions about the algorithm. They all got it wrong. That prompted him to write Paxos Made Simple.
It's good to know that it's not always my fault when academic papers are entirely inscrutable.